Performing India in America through Pragma-Cultural Markers

Intercultural Communication is marked in literary discourse in numerous ways. Diasporic literary discourse representing intercultural communication uses pragma-cultural markers such as food and music as tools of intercultural communication. This paper attempts to examine intercultural communication foregrounding these pragma-cultural markers as represented in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams within the framework provided by Relevance Theory (:249). This paper foregrounds the manner in which writers like Divakaruni deploy pragma-cultural markers to express multiple linguistic and cultural perspectives in their literary narratives, thereby portraying an amalgamation of America and India and facilitating intercultural communication which is a dialectical process, as on the one hand the “America” that is in the hearts, minds, and words of these writers shapes their expressions and on the other, their growing presence in terms of their literary output is changing the definition of American art and culture.     

Performing Child(hood)

Taking an example of play as our point of departure, we consider what it means to be a child and to perform (Butler, Feminism/Postmodernism, 1990; Gender, 1990. Routledge: New York) childhood. By drawing on poststructuralist accounts of subjectivity, language and meaning (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1979. Penguin: Harmondsworth; Derrida, Dissemination, 1974. Athlone: London), we argue that despite powerful discourses that seek to contain childhood, children manage to exceed or interrupt sites of containment. We then go on to suggest that if children themselves are moving beyond some of the discourses in which they are enwrapped, how might we seek to further destabilise what ‘becoming’ (Deleuze,1990: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm ) child might mean and what might be the implications for our practice(s) with children.     

Performing the limits of finance

Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive and all encompassing) encounter meaningful interruptions? This paper explores these questions by reviewing a cluster of public-art responses to the 2008 financial crisis mounted by artists critical of the expansive logic of financial abstraction. This paper pays particular attention to the work of Fergal McCarthy and Fred Forest, two public artists who have confronted finance and its rational culture with practices of gameplay, whimsy, and carnival. In doing so, these artists invoke a strategy designed to lay the all-encompassing claims of financial abstraction alongside its own impossibility; alongside performances which undermine the expansive claims of financial abstraction. These are strategies, I conclude, which can interrupt the technocratic discourses which dominate the contemporary cultures of finance; strategies which, in the words of one artist, evoke ‘plausible states of uncertainty’ about our faith in financial abstraction.     

The third place

This article examines the benefits that accrue from the utilization and personalization of places outside the workplace and the home. It is argued that participation in these third places provides people with a large measure of their sense of wholeness and distinctiveness. Third places are characterized in terms of sociability and nondiscursive symbolism. The benefits of third place involvement are discussed with reference to diversity and novelty, emotional expressiveness, color, and perspective.     

Putting Adam Ferguson in his place

This paper re-conceptualizes the relationship between Ferguson's life and work by locating him in his biographical and geographical context for the purposes of better understanding his proto-sociological writings. Ferguson's work is relatively unknown outside limited sets of literature and current representations of the link between his life and work risk misplacing him as both Scotsman and sociologist. The popular portrayal suggests there is a strong connection between his Highland background and his famous book An Essay on the History of Civil Society. It will be argued that this claim reproduces the social construction of space in Scottish society and is based on stereotypical views of his birthplace and upbringing. Ferguson did not construct an autobiographical narrative to offer his own understanding of the link between his life and work. This reflects the strengths and weaknesses of sociology as it was developing in the eighteenth century. The 'self' was not recognized as an object of intention or symbolic construction. Ferguson's writings analysed modernity as it was emerging in eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland and contrary to common opinion, there was no self-identity as a Highlander to shape his understanding of that social process.     

Performing Revolutionary Populism: The Revolutionary Path Movement in Turkey

Qualitative Sociology - Revolution scholars have noted the utility of populist appeals for creating a broad-based revolutionary movement. Yet little is known about how activists enact populism in...